by Jonathan Coe
All in all, then, a memorable evening – but one in many ways typical of what I have come to expect from this mad, wonderful business called the movies.
∗
Terry and Sarah kept in touch for about a year after they had moved out of the flat. Their restaurant meals dwindled into drinks, which in turn dwindled into telephone calls. She sensed a growing coldness in him. Some months after being fired from Frame he managed to find work on a TV listings magazine, where one of his jobs was to write short, eye-catching résumés of the week’s films. He was allowed an indiscriminate fifteen words per film, whether it was Smokey and the Bandit or La Règle du Jeu. Demeaning work, Sarah would have thought, but she couldn’t help noticing, the last few times she saw him, that he seemed to be applying himself to it with ever more single-mindedness, and ever more manic energy. His eyes, which had always been hooded with the dead weight of his fourteen hours’ nightly sleep, were soon red-rimmed and staring. He admitted that he didn’t need nearly so much sleep any more. He admitted that his interest in Salvatore Ortese, Latrine Duty and the whole subject of ‘lost’ films was beginning to dwindle. His visionary, elusive, Edenic dreams were becoming less and less frequent: once a week, then once a month, if that. He no longer saw any point in spending half of his life asleep. He sat up most nights, until dawn sometimes, watching films on television or video. What sort of films? Sarah would ask; and Terry would shrug his shoulders and say, It doesn’t really matter.
After they lost touch, Sarah disappeared from Terry’s view, teaching being one of the more anonymous professions. But she continued to see his name in the magazines, and then the newspapers, his byline getting more and more prominent, his articles rising closer and closer to the top of the page. Sometimes she even saw him on television; and though her interest in film theory was never more than casual, she knew enough to realize that he had become one of the leading spokesmen for a form of criticism which jettisoned all the concepts of value that had been held dear, only a few years earlier, even by Terry himself. Beyond that, she had no idea what kind of person he had become, or what kind of life he lived now. Sometimes she liked to believe
REM Sleep
16
believe that I may have known your brother.’
Something seemed to flare in Dr Madison’s eyes for a moment – some hint of circumspection, bordering on alarm – but she subdued it quickly and said: ‘Really? You knew Philip?’
Now it was Terry who looked surprised. ‘No, not Philip: Robert. Your brother Robert.’
‘My brother’s name is Philip. He’s a geneticist. Lives in Bristol.’
This didn’t sound promising. ‘Was he a student here?’ Terry asked.
‘At this university? No. He went to Cambridge.’
‘The guy I’m thinking of,’ said Terry, persisting, ‘was a student here. He was one of my best friends. He looked exactly like you, and he said that he had a twin sister called Cleo who was given up for adoption when he was very small.’
Dr Madison smiled. ‘It’s a nice story,’ she said, ‘but I think you must be imagining it. The resemblance, I mean. I never had a twin brother.’
‘Were you adopted?’
Dr Madison looked at her watch. ‘Terry, I have a seminar to conduct.’
She found him again, early in the evening, sitting out on the terrace with a notepad and pencil on his lap.
‘Another film review?’ she asked, pulling up a chair and sitting alongside him.
‘No: I was just making some notes, actually. Memories, impressions, that sort of thing… I don’t know why.’
‘Where’s the computer, then? Batteries being recharged?’
‘No, I just felt like writing, for a change.’
‘Ah.’ Dr Madison crossed her legs, then uncrossed them, then sat forward in her chair. She seemed to be lacking her usual composure. ‘I lied to you this morning,’ she now said, unexpectedly. ‘I was adopted. I was adopted when I was three weeks old. My new parents called me Sally but I always hated the name and years later they told me what my real name had been, so I’ve been using it ever since. And I did have a twin brother, and his name was Robert.’
Terry shook his head in disbelief – not at this story, but at the twists of chance that had now brought the two of them together.
‘I knew it was you,’ he said. ‘I knew it had to be you. It’s been so long, you see, since I’ve taken any notice of faces; been able to recognize people. And last night was the first time that I’d heard your name. But… but anyway – what happened? Have you ever met your real parents? Have you ever met Robert?’
Cleo nodded. ‘Yes. I traced them, eventually. Curiosity got the better of me.’ She appeared, for the time being, to have nothing more to say on this subject. ‘You were good friends, you said?’
‘Yes. Pretty close.’
‘Did you keep in touch with him after leaving university?’
‘I tried writing to him once or twice. But I don’t think he wanted to stay in touch with any of us, for some reason. He just disappeared.’
‘Did anyone know where he went? Did anyone ever wonder?’
‘Yes, I’m sure they did.’
Cleo stared out to sea. Her spectacles were tinted, and the lenses grew darker as the evening sunlight shone full upon them, making the expression in her eyes unguessable. Something about her reticence was starting to make Terry nervous, and a black, nameless suspicion crept up on him.
‘He is – he is still alive, isn’t he?’
After a long pause, she said: ‘No.’
Terry bowed his head. Somehow he had been anticipating this: the news was numbing, rather than revelatory.
‘Oh shit,’ he said; and exhaled deeply. ‘You know, I always thought… I sometimes wondered if he would end up doing that.’
‘Doing what?’ said Cleo, with a sharp edge to her voice.
‘Killing himself.’
‘I didn’t say that that’s what happened.’
‘No – but it is, isn’t it?’ She stared ahead, not answering. ‘Do you know why?’ Still no answer. ‘How?’
‘I think there was a woman,’ she said: so slowly, so effortfully that the words were almost slurred. ‘Some woman he was deeply in love with. As for how…’ She took off her glasses, rubbed her eyes, then rushed on: ‘He drove his car into a wall one night. A street in South London. No note, no farewells, nothing.’
‘Poor Robert,’ Terry mumbled; then fell into helpless silence. He knew that this conversation, or the memory of it, would stir some feeling in him eventually – some residue of grief, or regret – but for the moment his gaze remained fixed on the horizon, and gave nothing away. When a low sunbeam spilled out from behind a cloud he was dazzled by its reflections upon the water, and fleetingly he had a vision: the wall of some South London cul-de-sac, white and brilliant in the glare of the headlamps from Robert’s car as he drove into it. He wondered if the faintest memory of their friendship might have passed through his mind: some thin reminiscent flicker…
‘When was this?’ Terry said at last.
‘Eight years ago.’
‘And had you known him long, by then?’
‘No. We’d met for the first time, just a few months before.’
‘That must have been extraordinary, though,’ said Terry, trying – for his own benefit as much as Cleo’s – to inject a cheerier note. ‘To meet up with your twin – your other half, your counterpart – after so many years. You must have been, what, twenty-six, twenty-seven…?’
He tailed off as Lorna came hurrying out on to the terrace with a message for Dr Madison.
‘We’ve got a rather strange girl in reception. I’ve tried talking to her but she says she needs to see you personally.’
‘What does she want to see me about?’
‘She wants to spend the night here. She says she’s been talking in her sleep and she’s worried about it.’
‘Who’s referred her?’
‘I don’t think any
one has. She lives locally and she’s just turned up on spec.’
‘Well, send her away. Nobody gets in here without a referral.’
‘I told her that.’ Lorna paused, then pointed out: ‘We do have a bedroom free, though. Because of that cancellation.’
‘Makes no difference,’ said Dr Madison.
‘Yes, but this girl…’ Lorna persisted, uncertainly. ‘She says that you met her recently and gave her your card and told her that she could come here.’
Cleo remembered, now, the young woman who had sat next to her on the beach, the day she returned from her holiday. In retrospect, giving her that card had been an embarrassing thing to do, and she had assumed that it was probably thrown away immediately. Even now, pleased as she was to hear of the woman’s arrival, she was mildly shocked by her audacity in turning up unannounced.
Lorna said: ‘She asked me to tell you her name, as well.’
‘Her name?’
‘Yes. She was most particular about that.’
Cleo frowned. ‘Well, I can’t imagine why. What is it, anyway?’
∗
‘Language is a traitor, a double agent who slips across borders without warning in the dead of night. It is a heavy snowfall in a foreign country, which hides the shapes and contours of reality beneath a cloak of nebulous whiteness. It is a crippled dog, never quite able to perform the tricks we ask of it. It is a ginger biscuit, dunked for too long in the tea of our expectations, crumbling and dissolving into nothingness. It is a lost continent.’
Russell Watts looked around at his audience impressively. He seemed to have won their attention. Dr Herriot and Professor Cole sat in armchairs on either side of his bed; Dr Dudden sat on the bed itself, as did Dr Myers, whose idea this informal seminar had been. ‘It’s absurd,’ he had said over dinner, ‘that we have five distinguished practitioners gathered together here, and all we’re doing is playing games with jelly babies and pipe-cleaners.’ He had suggested that they should round off the day by convening in somebody’s room and having a group discussion on a serious work-related topic; at which point Russell Watts had intervened, inviting them all to his room and offering to read them a paper which he was intending to present at a conference of Lacanian analysts in Paris next week. It was entitled: The Case of Sarah T.: or, an Eye for an ‘I’.
This invitation was accepted by the other four with varying degrees of alacrity, the least enthusiastic – by some margin – being Dr Herriot. There was a certain unwillingness, too, on the part of Professor Cole, who was once again not in the best of tempers. He had phoned his hospital just before dinner, only to be informed that the schizophrenic patient had not merely been discharged, but discharged that very evening; sent back to his council flat in Denmark Hill, where there was no one at all – to the best of the Professor’s knowledge – who would be able to look after him. With this alarming development preying on his mind, he was not predisposed to listen with much sympathy to Russell Watts’s paper. He had, in any case, spent his entire career working for distinguished London teaching hospitals, and was suspicious of this self-styled maverick, with his dubious professional status. These factors, combined with a pragmatic Englishman’s thoroughgoing scepticism about Lacanian methodology, were enough to bring a battle-hungry glint to the Professor’s eye.
‘This is a story,’ Russell Watts continued (reading from the screen of his laptop computer), ‘about language and the games it plays with us; about how language colludes with the unconscious; about the unholy alliance between the signified order and the repressed contents of the neurotic mind.
‘Sarah T. is a young woman who was sent to me for psychotherapy. Her GP was of the opinion that she was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Her marriage was in crisis and she had recently been sacked from her job as a primary school teacher. She was not sleeping well, and this in turn was disturbing her husband’s sleep and exacerbating the problems in their relationship. She suspected him of infidelity.
‘At our first session she described to me the process by which she had lost her job. Exhausted from lack of night-time sleep, she had dozed off while teaching a lesson. When her headmaster arrived unexpectedly in the classroom a few minutes later, he found her sleeping soundly in front of an unruly class. This incident subsequently led to her dismissal. There had been other, similar ones, it transpired. There were two members of Sarah’s class whom she had trusted, and who had been in the habit of waking her whenever she fell asleep in such circumstances. On this last occasion, however, they had decided to take advantage of her and to let her sleep on while the class enjoyed a period of unsupervised leisure. I asked her whether she had mentioned this to her headmaster and she said that she had not, because “I wanted to protect my pupils”. I thought this a most remarkable turn of phrase, but naturally refrained from comment. As Lacan has so elegantly expressed it: “We must recognize, not that the analyst does not know anything, but that he is not the subject of his knowing. It is thus impossible for him to speak what he knows.”
‘At our second session, after a period of perhaps five or six minutes, Sarah fell into a profound sleep, which lasted for the remainder of the consultation. Even more interestingly, when she awoke she seemed to be under the fixed impression that we had been engaged in animated dialogue for the last hour. Had she dreamed this dialogue, I was forced to ask myself? It was too early to reach a conclusion, but I decided to encourage her in this fascinating delusion, by charging her my full fee for a sixty-minute session.
‘During the next few meetings our conversation ranged, in a pleasingly haphazard way, over three central subjects: Sarah’s dreams, the continuing disintegration of her marriage, and her sexual history.
‘Sarah’s dreams fell into two distinct types. Many of them involved no fantastic element at all, but were thoroughly rooted in reality and mundane, often domestic detail. Mundane as they were, however, these dreams could also be very vivid, and she sometimes had difficulty distinguishing the events of her dreams from the events of her real life. I asked her for an example, and she told me that once she had fallen asleep in the course of proof-reading a magazine article, and dreamed that she had “taken out” one of the footnotes, when in fact she had not. She described to me the unfortunate consequences of this dream, but they were of less interest, in my opinion, than her choice of the ambiguous phrase “take out”, which, as I’m sure you are aware, can also refer to the act of escorting a prospective lover on a date – the prelude to sexual intercourse, in many instances – or even to an act of assassination.
‘On the other hand, Sarah also had more bizarre and imaginative dreams, bordering on nightmares: these frequently involved lizards, snakes, and in particular frogs.
‘“Are you frightened of frogs?” I once asked her.
‘“Perhaps I am,” Sarah answered. “They repulse me, but I also feel sorry for them.”
‘“Why such a complex reaction?” I asked.
‘“Because of their eyes,” she said. “I don’t like the way their eyes bulge out. It makes them look ugly and vulnerable.”
‘She then described to me a strange occurrence from her student days. At an end-of-term party, one student had been entertaining a group of his friends with an obscene joke about a frog that performed fellatio. He had described the frog, Sarah said, in striking physical detail. When he reached the “punch-line” of the joke, Sarah had been joining in the laughter of the group, but had suddenly lost control of herself, and had collapsed into a sort of faint. Once again I refrained from commenting on this story, although the inference to be drawn from it was plain…’
‘Of course: Sarah was narcoleptic,’ said Professor Cole.
Russell Watts looked up in surprise. ‘Pardon?’
‘An obvious case of narcolepsy. She was exhibiting three of the classic symptoms.’
‘I don’t quite follow.’
‘Excessive daytime sleepiness; vivid pre-sleep dreaming; cataplexy brought on by laughter. Three of the main symptoms of n
arcolepsy. Wouldn’t everyone agree?’
He looked around for confirmation. Dr Myers nodded vigorously, and Dr Herriot said, ‘Yes, absolutely.’
‘And what about you, Dr Dudden? You’re the sleep specialist, after all.’
Dr Dudden seemed to have something else on his mind at that moment. Most of the colour had drained from his face and he was taking small, nervous sips from a glass of water. Now, realizing that he was being directly addressed, he managed to murmur something along the lines of, ‘Quite so – narcoleptic – no doubt about it’; after which, in an apparently casual tone of voice, he asked Russell Watts this question:
‘Of course, purely as a matter of professional protocol, I’m assuming that you have changed all the names in this case?’
Russell Watts stared at him curiously and said, ‘Actually, no. That isn’t my practice. When you’re working in a discipline which concerns itself so minutely with matters of linguistics and nomenclature, case studies can often become quite meaningless if the names are changed.’
‘Do you make that clear to your patients?’ asked Dr Myers.
‘Of course.’ He turned back to Professor Cole. ‘On the subject of Sarah’s narcolepsy, you may have a point, I suppose. That was something her GP should have spotted.’
‘I’m amazed he didn’t.’
‘You realize that this was several years ago. There was far less awareness of the syndrome then.’
‘But did it never occur to you at all?’
‘It’s not really that aspect of the case that interests me,’ Russell Watts stammered, avoiding the Professor’s eye and returning instead to his computer screen. ‘This is actually a case… a story about… as I said before, a story about language, and… and discourse… As will become apparent if you just let me continue, without further interruptions.’
‘By all means,’ said Dr Myers. ‘Do carry on. This is very intriguing.’